Apple Might Have to Buy 1/3 of Global Annual Gold Output for New Watch

The newest product to come from the maker of the iPhone will be a smart watch. It will connect to the iPhone to display notifications such as email and texts in addition to tell time. There will be several versions of the watch, ranging from the Sport version (expected to retail for around $349) to the Apple Watch Edition version, clad in 18K gold.

The price for the Apple Watch Edition version hasn’t been revealed yet (nor has the price for any of the versions) but some analysts are already speculating that it could be priced in the “luxury” range between $5,000 and $10,000, comparable to the price of a lower-end Rolex.

The final price will depend on how much gold is actually used in the product.

Some believe the Apple Watch Edition could contain as much as two troy ounces. Unless the band is also made of gold, that’s probably a bit of an over-estimate. At current prices, that would be more than $2,300 worth of the precious metal.

While that is a lot of gold and will certainly equate to a very high price point, Apple might find other obstacles when it comes to making and selling such a luxury product. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the company expects to sell as many as 1 million of the Apple Watch Edition per month in Q2 of 2015.

So if it does end up containing 2 ounces per watch, that’s going to come out to 746 metric tonnes of gold which is about 30% of all of the gold mined in the world each year.